Here Comes Civilization: The Complete Science Fiction of William Tenn Volume II (44 page)

And finally, "Confusion Cargo." The story I wrote, my first attempt at an action piece, was originally titled "Glutinous Mutiny" (the editor told me over the phone that he loved the title and would therefore buy the story without reading it. Then he changed the title to "Confusion Cargo"!) and was planned as the first of a series parallelling Nordhoff and Hall's Bounty trilogy. "Glutinous Mutiny" was to be followed by "Men Against Space" and, finally, "Pitcairn's Asteroid."

I lost interest and never did the two sequels, something for which I am today rather grateful.

Two last notes on this one. As I now reread the piece, I am impressed by how much glittering sci-fi (as opposed to science fiction) I managed to pack into it: "negship," "viscodium," "dellite," "restrainons," "
hwat
suits," "sawed-off shmobber"—and that's just in the first eight paragraphs!

But second, and as to science fiction: The editors of what was, after all, a true-blue, down-to-Mars pulp magazine, told me they were rather uncomfortable with a
female
protagonist in an action story, not to mention some crazy kind of feminist organization that was sufficiently bellicose actually to cooperate with the enemy in a war.

Fortunately for my first attempt to sell outside of Campbell, however, they felt there was just enough shoot-em-up in the narrative to cover such loopy and subversive ideas.

That's the lot: seven stories written primarily to pay the rent and buy some food. They're not really all that bad, and they're fairly good examples of a lot of science fiction of the period, but I only hope the reader will agree with my editors and publishers about the wisdom of including them here—and not agree with me.

Everyone is astonished at the change in Morniel Mathaway since he was discovered, everyone but me. They remember him as an unbathed and untalented Greenwich Village painter who began almost every second sentence with "I" and ended every third one with "me." He had all the pushing, half-frightened conceit of the man who secretly suspects himself to be a second-rater or worse, and any half-hour conversation with him made your ears droop with the boastful yells he threw at them.

I understand the change in him, the soft-spoken self-deprecation as well as the sudden overwhelming success. But then, I was there the day he was "discovered"—except that isn't the right way to put it. To tell you the truth, I don't know how to put it really, considering the absolute impossibility—yes, I said
impossibility
, not improbability—of the whole business. All I know for sure is that trying to make sense out of it gives me belly-yammers and the biggest headache this side of calculus.

We were talking about his discovery that day. I was sitting, carefully balanced, on the one wooden chair in his cold little Bleecker Street studio, because I was too sophisticated to sit in the easy chair.

Morniel practically paid the rent on his studio with that easy chair. It was a broken-down tangle of filthy upholstery that was high in the front of the seat and very low in the back. When you sat in it, things began sliding out of your pockets—loose change, keys, wallets, anything—and into the jungle of rusty springs and rotting woodwork below.

Whenever newcomers came to the place, Morniel would make a big fuss about showing them to "the
comfortable
chair." And as they twisted about painfully trying to find a spot between the springs, his eyes would gleam and he'd get all lit up with good cheer. Because the more they moved about, the more would fall out of their pockets.

After a party, he'd take the chair apart and start counting the receipts, like a store owner hitting the cash register the evening after a fire sale.

The only trouble was, to sit in the wooden chair, you had to concentrate, since it teetered.

Morniel couldn't lose—he always sat on the bed.

"I can't wait for the day," he was saying, "when some dealer, some critic, with an ounce of brain in his head sees my work. I can't miss, Dave, I know I can't miss; I'm just too good. Sometimes I get frightened at how good I am—it's almost too much talent for one man."

"Well," I said, "there's always the—"

"Not that it's too much talent for me," he went on, fearful that I might have misunderstood him. "I'm big enough to carry it, fortunately; I'm large enough of soul. But another, lesser guy would be destroyed by this much totality of perception, this comprehension of the spiritual
gestalt
, as I like to put it. His mind would just crack wide open under the load. Not me, though, Dave, not me."

"Good," I said. "Glad to hear it. Now if you don't
mi
—"

"Do you know what I was thinking about this morning?"

"No," I said. "But, to tell you the truth, I don't really—"

"I was thinking about Picasso, Dave. Picasso and Rouault. I'd just gone for a walk through the pushcart area to have my breakfast—you know, the old the-hand-is-quicker-than-the-eye Morniel—and I started to think about the state of modern painting. I think about that a lot, Dave. It troubles me."

"You do?" I said. "Well,
I
tend to—"

"I walked down Bleecker Street, then I swung into Washington Square Park, and while I walked, I was thinking: Who is doing really important work in painting today, who is really and unquestionably great? I could think of only three names: Picasso, Rouault—and me. There's nobody else doing anything worthwhile and original nowadays. Just three names out of the whole host of people painting all over the world at this moment: just three names, no more. It made me feel very lonely, Dave."

"I can see that," I said. "But then, you—"

"And then I asked myself, why is this so? Has absolute genius always been so rare, is there an essential statistical limitation on it in every period, or is there another reason, peculiar to our own time? And why has my impending discovery been delayed so long? I thought about it for a long time, Dave. I thought about it humbly, carefully, because it's an important question. And this is the answer I came up with."

I gave up. I just sat back in my chair—not too far back, of course—and listened to him expound a theory of esthetics I'd heard at least a dozen times before, from a dozen other painters in the Village. The only point of difference between them was on the question of exactly who was the culmination and the most perfect living example of this esthetic. Morniel, you will probably not be amazed to learn, felt it was himself.

He'd come to New York from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a tall, awkward boy who didn't like to shave and believed he could paint. In those days, he admired Gauguin and tried to imitate him on canvas; he'd talk for hours, in the accents that sound like movie Brooklynese, but are actually pure Pittsburgh, about the
mystique
of folk simplicity.

He got off the Gauguin kick fast, once he'd taken a few courses at the Art Students League and grown his first straggly blond beard. Recently, he had developed his own technique, which he called smudge-on-smudge.

He was bad, and there were no two ways about it. I say that not only from my opinion—and I've roomed with two modern painters and been married for a year to another—but from the opinions of pretty knowing people who, having no personal axe to grind, looked his work over carefully.

One of them, a fine critic of modern art, said after staring slack-jawed at a painting which Morniel had insisted on giving me and which, in spice of my protests, he had personally hung over my fireplace: "It's not just that he doesn't say anything of any significance, graphically, but he doesn't even set himself what you might call
painterly
problems. White-on-white, smudge-on-smudge, non-objectivism, neoabstractionism, call it what you like, there's nothing there, nothing! He's just another of these loudmouth, frowzy, frustrated dilettantes that infest the Village."

So why did I spend time with Morniel? Well, he lived right around the corner. He was slightly colorful, in his own sick way. And when I'd sat up all night, trying to work on a poem that simply wouldn't be worked, I often felt it would be relaxing to drift around to his studio for a spot of conversation that wouldn't have anything to do with literature.

The only trouble—and the thing I always forgot—was that it almost never was a conversation. It was a monologue that I barely managed to break in on from time to time.

You see, the difference between us was that I'd been published, even if it was only in badly printed experimental magazines that paid off in subscriptions. He'd never been exhibited—not once.

There was another reason for my maintaining a friendly relationship with the man. And that had to do with the one talent he really had.

I barely get by, so far as living expenses are concerned. Things like good paper to write on, fine books for my library, are stuff I yearn for all the time, but are way out of my reach financially. When the yearning gets too great—for a newly published collection by Wallace Stevens, for example—I meander over to Morniel's and tell him about it.

Then we go out to the bookstore—entering it separately. I start a conversation with the proprietor about some very expensive, out-of-print item that I'm thinking of ordering and, once I've got all of his attention, Morniel snaffles the Stevens—which I intend to pay for, of course, as soon as I'm a little ahead.

He's absolutely wonderful at it. I've never seen him so much as suspected, let alone caught. Of course, I have to pay for the favor by going through the same routine in an art-supply store, so that Morniel can replenish his stock of canvas, paint and brushes, but it's worth it to me in the long run. The only thing it's not worth is the thumping boredom I have to suffer through in listening to the guy, or my conscience bothering me because I know he never intends to pay for those things. Okay, so I will, when I can.

"I can't be as unique as I feel I am," he was saying now. "Other people must be born with the potential of such great talent, but it's destroyed in them before they can reach artistic maturity. Why? How? Well, let's examine the role that society—"

And that's exactly when I first saw it. Just as he got to the word "society," I saw this purplish ripple in the wall opposite me, the strange, shimmering outline of a box with a strange, shimmering outline of a man inside the box. It was about five feet off the floor and it looked like colored heat waves. Then there was nothing on the wall.

But it was too late in the year for heat waves. And I've never had optical illusions. It could be, I decided, that I had seen the beginnings of a new crack in Morniel's wall. The place wasn't really a studio, just a drafty cold-water flat that some old occupant had cleared so as to make one long room. It was on the top floor and the roof leaked occasionally; the walls were covered with thick, wavy lines in memory of the paths followed by the trickling water.

But why purple? And why the outline of a man inside a box? That was pretty tricky, for a simple crack in the wall. And where had it gone?

"—the eternal conflict with the individual who insists on his individuality," Morniel pointed out. "Not to mention—"

A series of high musical notes sounded, one after the other, rapidly. And then, in the center of the room, about two feet above the floor this time, the purple lines reappeared—still hazy, still transparent and still with the outline of a man inside.

Morniel swung his feet off the bed and stared up at it. "What the—" he began.

Once more, the outfit disappeared.

"W-what—" Morniel stuttered. "What's going
on
?"

"I don't know," I told him. "But whatever it is, I'd say they're slowly zeroing in."

Again those high musical notes. And the purple box came into view with its bottom resting on the floor. It got darker, darker and more substantial. The notes kept climbing up the scale and getting fainter and fainter until, when the box was no longer transparent, they faded away altogether.

A door slid back in the box. A man stepped out, wearing clothing that seemed to end everywhere in curlicues.

He looked first at me, then at Morniel.

"Morniel Mathaway?" he inquired.

"Ye-es," Morniel said, backing away toward his refrigerator.

"Morniel Mathaway," the man from the box said, "my name is Glescu. I bring you greetings from 2487 AD."

Neither of us could think of a topper for that one, so we let it lie there. I got up and stood beside Morniel, feeling obscurely that I wanted to get as close as possible to something I was familiar with.

And we all held that position for a while. Tableau.

I thought to myself, 2487 AD. I'd never seen anyone dressed like that. Even more, I'd never
imagined
anyone dressed like that and my imagination can run pretty wild. The clothing was not exactly transparent and yet not quite opaque. Prismatic is the word for it, different colors that constantly chased themselves in and out and around the curlicues. There seemed to be a pattern to it, but nothing that my eyes could hold down and identify.

And the man himself, this Mr. Glescu, was about the same height as Morniel and me and he seemed to be not very much older. But there was a something about him—I don't know, call it
quality
, true and tremendous
quality
—that would have cowed the Duke of Wellington. Civilized, maybe that's the word: he was the most civilized-looking man I'd ever seen.

He stepped forward. "We will now," he said in a rich, wonderfully resonant voice, "indulge in the twentieth-century custom of shaking hands."

So we indulged in the twentieth-century custom of shaking hands with him. First Morniel, then me—and both very gingerly. Mr. Glescu shook hands with a peculiar awkwardness that made me think of the way an Iowan farmer might eat with chopsticks for the first time.

The ceremony over, he stood there and beamed at us. Or, rather, at Morniel.

"What a moment, eh?" he said. "What a supreme moment!"

Morniel took a deep breath and I knew that all those years of meeting process servers unexpectedly on the stairs had begun to pay off. He was recovering; his mind was beginning to work again.